Horseshoe Crab

The horseshoe crab is struggling. I'm sure that if I spoke horseshoe crab, I would hear screams and pleadings. After all I'm holding it up to the fire on the beach. Aren't I cruel? Hideously cruel. I mean I've thrown twelve bottles of empty beer into the ocean. With every throw I hoped a whale would choke. I scratched my name and address into the glass, painstakingly. I wanted to be on the news. I wanted to be that bastard who choked a whale to death with an empty beer bottle.

Now look at me, now I'm just a fuck-up holding a horseshoe crab up to a campfire on the beach. How cruel.

The ocean is rolling in. It forms a nice background for the sizzles and pops. The crackle as the shell gets smaller and the insides of the horseshoe crab get larger, the snap as the shell cracks; these are the noises that I focus on over the endless chorus of waves coming in and going out.

I drove away all my friends this way.

Not by roasting horseshoe crabs. Not at all. I'm sure they wouldn't care. They've all got kids and careers and lives, they wouldn't care about one little horseshoe crab.

No I drove everyone away by holding myself over the fire. I tried to make them all hear the sizzles and pops. I wanted them to hear the crackle as the shell of my life got smaller and my insides forced themselves out through the cracks.

I'm not sure when the final pop happened, but now here I am alone on the beach. I'm staring up at the moon, and I wish I could find a way to hold it over a fire. I want to hear what happens to the moon when it starts cracking. How cruel am I?

I've tried to keep a steady balance, make sure no one loved me too much. I held everyone at a distance, even when I wanted them all to gather around and throw up their lunches at the sounds of my insides coming out. I wanted to turn their stomachs with the things I told them. I wanted to be the most fucked up of fuck-ups. I wanted a crown. I wanted a fucked up throne. because in my own little beach-combing mind I'm the god damned king of fucking-up.

I pissed away anything that ever meant something to me. That or someone took it away from me.

It all makes sense though. Especially when I look at the way the crab"s legs curl up in on themselves when the flame hits them. I want them to curl so far inward that they pierce the shell even further. I want the crab to rip off its own carapace in its dying struggles. Those meaningless dying struggles.

But here I am alone on the beach. Holding a crab over a fire. Listening to the pop and sizzle of something that isn't even edible. I'm watching the waves roll in, distorting the moon on the water. I'm wondering why I ever though ti was a good idea to be a horseshoe crab.

Weather

"What do you want from me?" The angry young man in the heartless brown suit asked.

"I want you to sit down and finish your coffee, and think about it, this an opportunity here." Replied the older woman in the uncompromising sunglasses, lit eerily against the overcast sky.

It had rained for three weeks, almost a full month of summer rain. In the streets people were talking about crop failure, and floods, and the market, and the economy, and the rest of the imaginary friends society keeps for some strange comfort. But at the inexplicable pair sitting outside at the cafe, even as the thunderheads rolled in, they were talking about the Weather, whether it would change.

"I don't know how it happened, look I really don't, if I knew I'd tell you, but I haven't talked to her." and after a pause of sudden respiration, and perhaps even emancipation, or inspiration, or revelation, the young man in the heartless brown suit continued. "I didn't talk to her before she" he asserted quickly "well, look I can't explain it, sometimes she's just gone, and here I am left holding what's left of this mess together."

"Ethan, listen to me, this is your last chance for the position, I've seen your camera tests, and from what I understand you're the best meteorologist the station has seen since Ed "Perfect December" Blakely died, god rest him. Now, I want to see you succeed, I really do, I think you've got great hair, great teeth, and your smile, well I think we can make people think it is supposed to be sunny when you tell them its raining, just by smiling."

"You really think so?" The young man in the heartless brown suit sipped his coffee and leaned back into the chair, and it seemed to him that a crack appeared in the clouds above him, just a tiny crack, and that maybe there would be sunshine today. "I mean, I could've gone anywhere you know. I had a job offer in Boston, you know that? I've never been to the ocean. I was gonna be the guy that set off the John Hancock Tower lights: steady blue, clear view; flashing blue, clouds are due; steady red, rain ahead; flashing red, snow instead."

Behind her uncompromising sunglasses the older woman, not old perhaps, but certainly mature, smiled. The smile did not reach her lips, and it was only for a moment, like a cloud passing over the sun.
"That sounds great Ethan, but nobody would have ever known who you are. What I'm offering you is local fame, and the money's not bad either."

"Yeah... but, I mean I can't, I mean I don't know where she is." Ethan's lips quivered as the word she passed through them, and the woman in uncompromising the sun glasses across from him saw her reflection in Ethan's eyes.

Ethan grew pale in his heartless brown suit. The skin of his upper lip began to perspire, and his leg trembled. Perhaps it was at the thought of giving her up for the job, for his future, but it was easily as likely that his leg began to shake and his lip began to sweat at the thought of being on camera, of being known, of getting the weather wrong.

He breathed in and almost sighed, but instead he spoke a sentence very quickly: "Amanda, the last time I saw her, she was leaving my apartment after I told her that I wasn't going to sleep with her. We had a big fight about..." and then a pause came. A look of fear came over Ethan's face as if he was suddenly afraid of revealing so much to the woman behind the uncompromising sun glasses. He finished his sentences speaking the words as if they were poison, only the poison came from them coming out, as if they were stoppers that had been loosed and the poison had been inside him all along. "We fought about the weather, she refused to let me help her." Then suddenly the poison didn't matter, words were coming out, and the original burn of illness had turned into a slick patina of rage and jealousy. "I was angry that she had been throwing away my analyses." Ethan's eyes began to light up, the sort of light that hits the bottom left corners of a persons eyes when they are lying, but believe that they are only bending the truth, or they believe that the truth is too complicated and cannot be extracted from the layers of past that surround it. "I think she was throwing them away before the broadcast, not even reading them."

"Ethan, that's what I wanted to hear. The job's yours. I'm firing Amanda." Sun broke through the clouds, and the woman behind the uncompromising sun glasses smiled, this time it reached her lips, she said "Can you believe she said it was supposed to rain today? With sun like this I could go to the beach." She grabbed her umbrella as she stood up and walked away, leaving Ethan smiling, but trembling.

He thought that perhaps if he had tried to tell the truth a little bit harder, than maybe it would've rained, but then he smiled and looked up at the sun coming through the clouds as if it were the blinking light of the studios cameras, and the clouds seemed to melt away.

Rejection Letters, a new series. Pt. 2

Dear Stephen,

Your Graduate School Application was lost in the mail, but that didn’t matter. There’s no room in your stupid choice of a major. Why did you ever think it was good idea? Also, even if there were room in the program you selected what makes you think your pitiful ideas are any good? This institution questions your right to exist based on the poor grades, and even worse letters of recommendation.

However, if you would like to apply again in a couple of years when you’ve all but given up on your dream of becoming a successful person, we’ll gladly accept your application for processing. Fair warning though, everyone younger than you is smarter and better trained at what you want to do; also they are better looking and have WAY MORE sex.

In all honesty the thing that made us reject you was the fact that you cry yourself to sleep at night. We don’t associate with babies.

Signed,

The Graduate School You Always Wanted To Go To

Rejection Letters, a new series.

Dear Abigail,

We cannot process your student loan request. You were wrong to think that you could get ahead in the world, stop trying. Our decision was based mostly on how attractive you are, which is clearly not enough. We suggest you get a large paper sack to cover your whole body.

Furthermore, after consulting with your parents we have determined that you are a disappointment to everyone you ever met, especially your Grandmother, who never loved you. We are informing you of this as a courtesy, in the hopes that you will continue to store the few dollars earned from your pitiful, dead end, minimum wage job in our trustworthy hands.



Formally,
Customer Service Representative #859-23-4788

To The One Who Knows Who This Is From: A Love Letter

At the very end of my life, perhaps I will regret all of the moments that I spent in pursuit of you. It was only those scant few decades, those April months spent staring at the moon: inhaling the scent of newly blooming flowers. Perhaps, upon my deathbed, I will recant all the days of my life; hoping that the seconds stolen with you will not weigh against the lonely years.

However, now that we are both in the prime of our lives, I cannot even hope to smell another scent than that of your hair. I cannot even dare to dream of another caress than that of your fingertips running up and down the inconsolable length of my arm. In the darkness I shiver at the memory of your touch, and my lips swell with hope in dreams as they gently devour yours in passionate sunlight.

Now, in the growing shadow of my youth I realize that I am wasted by those seconds of love. I am ruined by the impossible heights of passion, and the inconceivable depths of sorrow that our affair brought me. If only in a different time. If this or that hadn't happened, then perhaps now, you would wear something of mine, and I, your heart; would walk boldly in the streets. Alas, alas, alas, this or that was not meant to be.

Do not weep at this missive, for it is just that, a thing that may be dismissed. However, even though this letter is granted a brief nature, it reflects a sentiment that I hope is deeply missed. Instead of sorrow, know that I do not expect that my life find harbor in any distant port of love. Know that I only intend to travel upon the river of memory that flows from our fleeting love.

Yours,

Forever.

From The Desk of The Editor

Dear Reader,

Exciting news! The staff, by now you should get that joke, of this soiled publication has decided that it is in the worst interests of everyone they know to put out this publication in a physical format. What we're talking about here is a book. You'll be able to find it on Amazon.com in the coming months, and some discrete private distribution may happen as well.

Regards,

MJK

Dogwood

The best Swamp Magnolias in Powesheik County grow along the banks of the Deep River, just north of the town that shares its name. There is a grove, if you can call it that, which is split in half by the river. Their branches reach out to each other, straining to touch. In late spring their flowers fall into the river.

At that time of year a man by the name of Warren Guthrie used to sit on the muddy bank and watches as the petals drift lazily down the small shallow river. It wouldn't be right to describe Warren as a smart or happy man. He spent his life avoiding such things. His youth was wasted smoking marijuana in abandoned barns, and drinking stolen liquor in the darkness of Deep River's only movie theater. It didn't matter what movie or what barn, just as long as the whiskey was strong or the smoke was thick.

When he dropped out of High School he joined the military, and spent three years of the Korean War on a military base in Virginia, smoking dope and drinking beer. He was discharged, dishonorably, and he returned home.

He spent the better part of his life working as the worst mechanic in town. The cars he fixed usually came back months or even weeks later in worse condition. If word had gotten out at how poor of a mechanic he was the good people of Deep River would never have patronized Earl's Garage and Auto-Body Repair. Earl was a shrewd business man though and kept Warren on, he would rotate Warren from customer to customer, never letting him work on the same car twice. Earl explained this to his wife Sylvia saying "That boy doubles my business, it is getting to the point where people around here think their cars just fall apart." It was true.

Warren rarely talked when he smoked or drank, he just sat there with the same blank look on his face, as if he was watching the magnolia flowers drift slowly down Deep River.

When Warren died, of cancer at the age of 78, the county had to come and collect his body. He hadn't married, and there was no next of kin. These were unusual circumstances in Powesheik County, most people there had enough cousins to make dating a treacherous endeavor. It isn't unusual to find couples on their first dates reciting their family trees, looking for the branch that overlaps.

In his will Warren asked to be cremated and to have his ashes spread among the grove of magnolia trees. The county sent Glen Carrol out to search for the grove. It took three weeks of looking up and down both sides of Deep River before Glen realized that Swamp Magnolias don't grow in Poweshiek County, the winter kills them before they have a chance to take root.

So Warren's remains were spread under the branches of a stand of Dogwood trees. Now during the summer months Glen Carrol thinks of Warren Guthrie when he sees the white flowers of Dogwood trees.

We should all be so lucky.